Leo Tolstoy

He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

God is the same everywhere.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

No comment is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Are you using your pain as an excuse or as a source of strength?

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium – indifference.

Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.